In the Wake of Furloughs, Lay-offs and Salary Cuts, The New School Faculty Organize AAUP Chapter
New York, NY—The New School (TNS) chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) officially launches on Tuesday, September 1st.
The AAUP is a national organization that organizes and advocates for freedom of speech, horizontal campus governance, and the amplification of worker and student voices in all aspects of university life. TNS and AAUP share common founders and ideals, and members believe that launching a local chapter is in keeping with the historic mission and spirit of the university and its community.
The need for an AAUP chapter has been clear to workers across The New School for a long time, and the current launch is the result of urgent efforts to bring about its realization. “Our members believe that organizing a local chapter renews our university’s commitment to questions of social justice and political critique,” Jaskiran Dhillon, the newly elected President of the chapter, commented. “But it is no coincidence that the timing of our launch coincides with the administration’s efforts to push through a broad-reaching restructuring plan premised on mass layoffs of our most vulnerable, proposed program closures, and coerced early retirement of some of our longest tenured colleagues,” continued Dhillon.
Since March, TNS administration has proceeded with this effort with near-total opacity. In late spring 2020, the administration hired Huron, a notorious corporate consulting firm that has also been hired by other universities looking to shore up financial resources in the wake of purported economic crises. On August 6th, President Dwight McBride informed the community that university leadership had begun deliberations about the financial and operational challenges confronting The New School as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We set out to ‘reimagine’ our university—and, by that, I mean to take bold, transformative actions to become a more sustainable, resilient and efficient version of ourselves” explained McBride. Leadership at TNS has been initiating what they term “painful efficiency decisions” based on the recommendations of Huron, but it has refused to divulge the complete financial data driving their decision making. “We are repeatedly being told that the university is in a financial crisis, one that has been exacerbated by—but clearly preceded—the COVID-19 pandemic,” Dhillon said. “And in this moment, while refusing our demands to disclose the full financial picture informing the decisions that impact our livelihoods, they keep asking us to trust them. That doesn’t leave us with much choice but to organize,” she concluded.
The administration’s refusal to meaningfully engage with the workers and students who are the backbone of The New School flies in the face of basic principles of shared governance and in open defiance of the spirit of the institution they lead. “Our new chapter aims to collectively ensure that we return to our bedrock commitments of radical democracy, free thought, and resistance to forces that exacerbate and reproduce inequality. Our best traditions emphasize our opposition to universities that act like corporations, and our worst tendencies work to make us resemble them,” added Dhillon.
AAUP-TNS includes an expansive interpretation of “professor” and “teaching activity”: anyone engaged in curricular activity—librarians, curators, shop technicians, teaching graduate students—is included in its membership. According to the Leadership Council, this strategy for an inclusive membership is more important than ever. “The New School has become an institution that promotes neo-liberal principles of elite education and competition between its workers. Its employment categories for staff and faculty are diffuse and divisive, as are the differential resources for various parts of the university's schools. During a crisis, the administration relies on those fissures to ensure that we, as workers, lose the potential for collective power. AAUP provides the ground for us to build strength together,” noted Ulrich Lehmann, Vice President of the chapter.
According to Sanjay Reddy, Associate Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research and a new member of the chapter, “this university and others like it are in crisis, in part, because of poor decisions which have made them vulnerable, and a top-heavy model that has shifted burdens onto students, families, part-time and causalized faculty and staff, and increasingly stretched and disempowered full-time faculty. The University has to be reinvented as well as returned to its original goals of teaching and research, for which transparency, fairness, procedural propriety and faculty-led governance are essential. The AAUP chapter at the New School will help to advance these vital aims.”
The chapter will employ a range of strategies and tactics to accomplish its mission, focusing on base-building, political education, advocacy, and direct action in demanding redistributive justice. “The workers, students, and community members of the University understand that social and racial justice is also redistributive justice. Yet so far, there have been few cuts at the top. The administration hides behind a flag of social justice while enacting policies that are anything but oriented to questions of fairness and equality,” Dhillon said.
AAUP-TNS chapter will hold its first General Assembly meeting on October 12, Indigenous Peoples Day.